Cyberon.org - Notebook

How to have your Computer finding video's for you on internet.

With CouchPotato your computer can automatically search for a bunch of video's on the Internet. It allows to indicate your preference, such as quality, subtitles and language of the video. CouchPotato runs in the background. So every day you use your computer with proper setting it continues searching. It will send you a warning when (and which) video it did succesfully download. It checks torrents and newsgroups simultaneously. Sounds to good to be true, so out of curiosity I wanted to give it a try.
If that’s what you want too , please read on.

Free software needed:
CouchPotato is an Open Source program. It is free and is kept up-to-date by an active group of programmers. It's available for Apple, Microsoft and Linux. You may download it here.
In combination with CouchPotato you need to have a torrentclient, for example  Transmission and a usenetclient such as SABnzbd+ . Both are Open Source programs as well.

What’s needed for setup of CouchPotato:
Assuming, that you want CouchPotato to put the downloaded video in your standard Movie folder, you will need to create 4 additional folders. You can put them anywhere on your system. You can give them any name you prefer. I created 4 subfolders in my standard Download folder, with the names: complete, incomplete, watchnzb and newtorrent. You need these folders for:

  • watchnzb: CouchPotato stores here the torrent file and/or the nzb file, once it found your video. Transmission or SABnzbd+ will then pick it up, and begin the download.
  • incomplete: This is where SABnzbd+ stores the bunch of files that make your video. It’s in fact a temporary folder.
  • newtorrent: In this folder Transmission stores the not yet completed video download. Once it is complete, it moves the file to the next folder:
  • complete: This is where both SABnzbd+ and Transmission store the processed (complete) video’s. CouchPotato will pick it up here, rename the video to your liking and store the result in your Movies folder.

CouchPotato communicates with Transmission and SABnzbd+ via their GUI web interfaces. So you need to setup  Remote control for both of them, and tell CouchPotato for each which port to use. Don’t worry! I’ll explain it below.
Here we go:

Transmission.
You may download Transmission for Windows, MacOS or Linux from here. You can use it right away for torrent downloading. For it's communication with Couchpotato, go to Preferences -> Remote. Put a checkmark before “Enable remote access”, and one before “Require Authentication”. Type a username (admin is fine) and password and write that down, because you will need it later for configuration of Couchpotato.
Next we will point Transmission to the proper folders. Open Preferences -> Transfers -> Adding. For “Default location” browse to your folder complete. Checkmark “Keep incomplete files in:” and browse to your folder newtorrent. Finally checkmark “Watch for torrent files in:” and browse to your folder watchnzb.

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Next:

SABnzbd+.
SABnzbd+ can be downloaded from here. Once installed, start the program, select your language and start Wizard. If for whatever reason you don’t see anything, open this link in a separate window in your browser:  http://localhost:8080/sabnzbd/
Enter the details of your primary usenet provider. Port 119 is your best bet, unless your usenet provider allows SSL access. 



Click “Test server” and the response should be “Connection Successful!”. Click “next”. Checkmark “Launch my internet browser…..” and again click “next”. SABnzbd+ will tell you “Setup is now complete!”, restart, and open a new tab in your browser with SABnzbd+’s main screen. It looks like this:




So far, so good.
The final step is configuration: click the   button and “General”. Under the heading SABnzbd Web Server, accept the defaults, and please note the API key. This API key you need later when configuring CouchPotato, so remember where it is: 


Under “Tuning” you may define a cleanup list, as explained.
Next click “Folders”. 
As explained above, here you must point SABnzbd+ at least to two different locations on your HardDisk: incomplete, where SABbznd+ should store the whole bunch of files that make your video. And complete where after processing these files into your video, the video shall be stored. Click “Save” and continue.
Click “Switches”. To make life easy, just accept the defaults, but feel free to checkmark anything you would like as well. For example you might add some additional newsgroup servers.
Next click “Categories”. When CouchPotato(see below) instructs SABnzbd+ to download a video, this instruction is accompanied by a “Category” named “movies”. Therefore you also need to define a category “movies” in SABnzbd+ under Config -> Categories. The category “movies” must point to the folder complete, where CouchPotato can check, if the download is succesfully completed. It might look like this:


For the rest, just glance through. Its safe to accept the defaults, but feel free to accept anything you would like as well. Having saved all your changes, SABnzbd+ should run properly. If you wish, you may download an .nzb file from a nzb indexer, and check the proper behavior of the program.
Let’s move on to the final step: installation of CouchPotato:

CouchPotato.
You can download CouchPotato here. Once the installation is finished, a new window opens in your browser. It shows the configuration wizard: “Welcome to the new CouchPotato”. If not so, type: http://localhost:5050/wizard/ in your browser. Scroll down in the wizard till you arrive at “General”. Put a checkmark in front of “Launch the browser when I start”.
Scroll down to “Downloaders”. Checkmark SABnzbd, and complete the required information: accept the default host, copy and paste the API key from SABnzbd+, and fill in movies as the Category. Also its wise to put a checkmark after “Delete Failed”. 
Scroll down to “Providers”. Here you need to indicate which sites you want CouchPotato to use to search for .nzb files. Some of them you can just checkmark. Others require an API key, which you can get for free, when visiting their website and register as a user.

Continue to “Renamer”, and checkmark “Rename Downloaded movies”. “From” is the folder, where SABnzbd+ downloads the movies (complete in my example). “To” is the folder, where you want CouchPotato to move the video to after corrections and changing the name (Movies). The two have to be different folders, else you get an error! Next to Folder Naming and File Naming you can indicate how the subfolder and the video should be named by CouchPotato. (Click “show naming options”, etc.). Please note the dots you need to add between the parts in the file naming! Finally checkmark “Cleanup leftover files”. Here is my example:


If you wish, you can also checkmark “Download subtitles after rename” and the languages of your choice. Isn’t it nice?
Scroll down to the bottom, and click the big green button. Now you are in CouchPotato’s main screen.
Before starting your first download, let’s check on a few settings. Click:

and next click on the left “Searcher”. Here you define your preferred options. Also fill in the number of days your provider keeps the files on their newsserver up to date. On the link Nzb Providers you have more options for nzbindexers (Nzbindex is a good one!).

In the next part “Quality” you can define the quality profiles that you want the downloaded video’s to meet. Play with it. And if you want subtitles with your video, checkmark “Download Subtitles after Rename”, and indicate the subtitle language(s) you want.

Your first download with CouchPotato:
So now you are ready for the first download. Let me take as an example the Open Source movie Big Buck Bunny. Type “big buck bunny” and Enter:

After a while CouchPotato comes back with a picture and a short description of the movie. If this is the one you are looking for, click on the picture, and you will get this:

Select the quality you prefer, and click “Add”. After a while, CouchPotato will show you this:


In fact it confirms, it searched for your video with the indicated quality. The buttons are all in grey: CouchPotato yet couldn’t find the quality you are looking for. Maybe a few weeks later, these buttons may look as follows:

Click the green button of your choice, and CouchPotato shows you the different files it found. Click your preference, and the download of your movie starts.


Final Remarks:

  • You should occasionally check CouchPotato’s log file: Configuration -> Log. Only the lines printed in red need your attention. When done, click “Clear”. Next time after reboot check again.
  • When you convinced yourself, that CouchPotato is running as expected, go to Manage -> Searcher. Checkmark “Show advanced settings”. Under “Cronjob” you can tell CouchPotato how often you want it to search again for the video’s on your wishlist. My suggestion: once every day is more than enough.
  • Only for Apple users: If you want your Apple to automatically start these three programs at login, go to Apple -> System Preferences -> Users & Groups and Tab Login Items. To make changes, click the Lock in the lower left hand corner. Click +, and browse to the applications you want to add. Checkmark them, and click the Lock again. 


Please note, that CouchPotato is for downloading of movies only. If you want to download music you must use HeadPhones instead. For TV series you need SickBeard. For each of them you need to define different “Categories” in SABnzbd+ and add some additional folders to your system (compare with info at the top of this page).